Writers and Editors

“There’s no money in poetry, but there’s also no poetry in money."
~ Robert Graves

"Genius is childhood recovered at will."
~Charles Baudelaire

T.S. Eliot on the role of “place” in his work:
“ . . . putting it as modestly as I can, it wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America.”
~from a Paris Review "Writers at Work" interview

"Every positive impulse is a prayer
~poet Diane Frank

"Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing."
~ Donald Hall, former poet laureate

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.”
~William Butler Yeats

"A student brings something to discuss, saying, 'I don't know whether this is really good, or whether I should throw it in the wastebasket.' The assumption is that one or the other choice is the right move. No. Almost everything we say or think or do — or write — comes in that spacious human area bounded by something this side of the sublime and something above the unforgivable."
~William Stafford

“A poet can survive anything but a misprint."
~ Oscar Wilde

"I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet."
~ Ogden Nash

"The poet has gained the happy position wherein he can praise his own poetry in the press and explain it in the classroom, and the reader has been bullied into giving up the consumer's power to say, 'I don't like this, bring me something different.'... Poetry needs to be rescued from among our duties and restored to our pleasures."
~ Philip Larkin, quoted in Cynthia Crossen's review of Larkin's "Required Writing" (Readback column, WSJ.com)

"Poets don't have biographies. Their work is their biography."
~Octavio Paz, "A Note to Himself"

"You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone."
~ John Ciardi

"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
~ Virginia Woolf

"Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."
~ Don Marquis

"Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around."
~ Herman Melville's wife, Elizabeth, letter to her mother

It is difficult
To get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

~ William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower”

"I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way!"
~ Carl Sandburg

Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.
~ Robert Frost